Tag Archives: 3d rendering

I’ve just finished creating this logo for a client, to use for his new miniatures rule system which he’s working on. Modelled in Blender and rendered with Cycles. I also did a little bit of post work in Photoshop. Not much, just touching up a few fireflies, cleaning up some reflections I wasn’t happy with, adding a few glints and highlights here and there and some colour correction.

Here’s a few wip images from the process.

Initial Sketch from client’s sketch.

Clean lineart from Illustrator to model from.

Some colour tests from Illustrator.

Photoshop mockup.

Initial Blender model.

Model version 2.

And here are a few Blender screenshots of the finished model to keep you Blenderheads happy! If you’re wondering what all the hemispheres are in the last screenshot, there’s a great tutorial on Youtube from Scifi Animator about using them to light scenes in Blender Cycles, a great tip which I’ll be using again. Best new feature in Blender that I’m loving at the minute is the Inset tool (shortkey – ‘i’), it would have been a nightmare job trying to do those little borders without it.

This is the first relatively successful track I’ve managed to create with the new motion tracking features in Blender 2.62. I wasn’t really concentrating on the animation too much, I just gave the little dragon guy a bit of life to see how well he would sit among some live footage. I’m still trying to get the hang of it, I haven’t done much 3d motion tracking in the past (plenty of 2d though). This footage I just shot on my iPhone at my desk, so the compression and motion blur on clip isn’t overly conducive to tracking but with a bit of fiddling and tweaking by hand I eventually got a decent timeline. I had downloaded various clips from the internet, if you do a search for ‘free tracking clips’ you’ll find a few places to download them from, but I was having trying to find sensor sizes and focal length for these particular clips. I then decided to shoot some footage with my phone since I already knew these details and finally got this result. It’s far from perfect but it’s a good start with a Blender feature which I can see fast becoming a powerful tool in my arsenal of vfx tools.

I fancied having a play around with Cycles, so I downloaded the Cycles trunk (2.60.5 r42078) from Graphicall.org. I really love how easy it is to work with, I was getting some really nice results using the Nvidia Quadro with Cuda. You can get some gorgeous lighting setups quickly and easily, once you have a play around. There’s still a few things to iron out, for example I found that there didn’t seem to be any fresnel effect with glassy textures (maybe I’m just missing something). Here’s a few results:

Here’s a scene I set up with a few objects I had lying around from various jobs. I just threw them into a scene adding a floor plane with a texture I downloaded from CGTextures.com. Again, it was pretty easy to set up, although I did get a couple of crashes along the way, but then this isn’t a stable trunk I’m using. The first image is a setup with just one sun lamp. The second I added some cubes to the right off camera to simulate some building shadows and added some depth of field, again surprisingly easy to set up. The first two images are the Cycles renders from the 3d views. Where I hit a little trouble in the third image was with a final render, it seems a lot darker than the preview render. I’m not sure if something was set that I don’t know about, the only thing I thought it might be was the exposure button, however this didn’t seem to fix the problem. I’ll have to investigate further.